Organisational change will require soul-searching and a willingness to embrace fundamental changes to the ways things have always been done, according to change management business The Satori Lab

With public sector budgets under continued pressure, the search is on for public sector organisations to find more efficient ways to use their stretched resources.

One business set up in January believes it has a way to help them do just that. But it will require some real soul-searching and a willingness to embrace fundamental changes to the ways things have always been done.

The Satori Lab, based in Cardiff, was set up by co-founders Esko Reinikainen, Jo Carter and Danielle Beck, who all have previous local authority experience.

They style themselves ‘culture hackers’, a tagline which Ms Carter admits was chosen purposely to get people questioning what it means.

“For most people when you say hackers, it evokes spotty teenagers in basements with computers that break into systems and misbehave,” said Mr Reinikainen.

“A hacker is someone who’s very curious about how systems work and how they can improve them. There’s an ethical code which has a set of rules. If you subscribe to those and practise according to them you can consider yourself a hacker.”

These rules, he added, are “the world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved; no problem should ever have to be solved twice; freedom is good, boredom and drudgery are evil; attitude is no substitute for competence.

“There’s also something around the hackerdom culture that says you have to earn your stripes and be validated by other people.”

The Satori Lab sets out to look at organisational cultures.

“We’re all public sector people, so primarily we’re observing public sector cultures and the interesting human dynamics that come out of the bureaucratic logics that public organisations have,” Mr Reinikainen said.

“Before I was in the public sector I spent 15 years in the theatre world. My background is looking at human dynamics and trying to elicit truth in performance. It turns out that in the work-professional culture there’s a lot of artifice going on, a lot of behaviour that’s disconnected from honest human relations.

“Nowadays, in this public finance deficit period, everybody is reaching for structural solutions for these problems but not many people are looking at what are the cultural conditions we have created in public sector organisations, and how they are contributing to inefficient use of resources.

“There are also much better models emerging from outside the public sector on how you organise work, how you develop new projects, that haven’t traditionally played a role in the public sector.

"Trying to introduce those into this firmly established public sector culture presents a bit of a challenge. From our observations, that challenge is largely cultural friction against new ideas coming into the system.”

The three co-founders have developed a toolkit of activities and methodologies that allow other people to examine what happens in their organisation’s culture and try to shift it to a different stance.

“Some systems don’t get the best out of people. They’re not set up for people and they’re not set up for the citizen’s needs, they’re set up for the organisation’s needs and people go along with the process because it’s been done like that for years, without questioning whether there is a better way of doing it,” said Ms Carter.

“What we’re helping people do is realise there is a different way of doing it, go out there and find those new models. Rather than salami slicing and getting rid of frontline services, you can find a different way of saving money while maintaining those services.”

Mr Reinikainen said: “There are some things in the public sector that work really well, but if you read the Williams Review [on local authorities and public service delivery] it reaffirms the observations we’ve been making and it points to very specific areas where there are deficits.

“We’re not the only people who have made the observations, but maybe we’re among the first who are positioning ourselves to help people emerge from this and develop better models.”

Ms Carter, who is originally from Bristol but worked for Monmouthshire County Council as a surveyor for 10 years, described how she had been inspired by an entrepreneurship school she had attended run by Mr Reinikainen last year.

“It completely changed my perspective on why I was doing what I’d been doing for nine years,” she said.

“I’d been going about my business thinking I am [at] the council, I’m going to do the job from the council’s point of view, it shifted me to [think] I should be doing what’s best for the citizens and listening to them and doing what they are directing me towards.”

The third member of the team, Danielle Beck, worked at Torfaen council for seven years and before that also at Monmouthshire County Council. She also has experience in the private sector. Her background is in HR and public relations, specialising in workforce development, training, and organisational development.

“My key passion is talent management and the individual,” she said.

“Fundamentally, the public services have got so many good projects in place, just the culture’s not necessarily in the place it needs to be to accept the new models that are coming in.”

Part of the problem, she believes, is the loss of the sight of the individual, with the focus being entirely on the organisation.

“There’s this almost mythical beast, rather than a collection of individuals who work together for the same shared goal, that shared goal being public service,” she said.

“I’ve been working in the partnership arena and what I’ve seen is that people within different organisations and cultures are trying really hard to work together and they’ve got one shared goal, but they can’t seem to meld that together because of their individual cultures and ways of working.”

Mr Reinikainen describes himself as “not a typical public servant”, having come from 15 years working in the theatre before seven years as arts development officer at Monmouthshire Council.

“I saw two big disconnects. One was between the communities outside the wall, their needs from their local government and public services. Stuff that was happening inside the council was happening to serve the council’s logic and needs,” he said.

“Also, internally, people who are initially vocational public servants, they went there to deliver public value yet were swimming in treacle in this system, which for some reason doesn’t allow them to release their maximum potential and deliver their public value.

“In some cases you can blame individuals, but the system as a whole has become this entity that workers within it are victims to, and it’s not any one person.”

Mr Reinikainen met a civil servant from the Welsh Government and set out on a two-year exploration of how to tackle the problems of organisational culture they had recognised in their own institutions. The result was the entrepreneurship school which Mr Reinikainen took to local authorities.

Given the huge financial pressure that public bodies are under, isn’t there a danger that the Satori Lab’s approach to organisational change may be looked upon as simply a way to cut costs?

“Personally I think it’s a mistake that facing that challenge you just reach for the next new model and hope that it’s going to fix everything, because that kind of motivation means you’re not going to reach deep enough and absorb the models to the level where they become useful, so you end up defaulting back to your salami slicing,” Mr Reinikainen said.

“The difference between truly deciding we can’t go on as we have before and just reaching for something requires a change of heart and perspective, a true desire for fundamental change, rather than surface change.

"The by-product of incorporating these new ideas around entrepreneurialism should be that you have better alternatives than traditional salami slicing, but if that’s the only reason you’re reaching for them you haven’t really understood your problem well enough yet.”

The Satori Lab has been financed entirely by the co-founders’ own investment. It ran its first workshops, in innovation and leadership, in April.

“We want to develop relationships with people who demonstrate that they don’t just talk a change narrative, they demonstrate that they understand the need for fundamental change,” Mr Reinikainen said.

“Imagine 10 years ago you were a regional manager at Blockbusters. You can see the environment is changing, online capabilities are getting better and better, but you didn’t understand how that would impact on your industry. Where are those guys now? They may be begging for a job at Netflix or Lovefilm.

“The winds of change are out there, the people who recognise that the changes are bigger than their capacity to handle them and they need some help, that’s where we come in. We want to build long-term relationships with people who are change-ready and give them the right tools so they can thrive in a changing market.”

Mr Reinikainen, who was born in France to a Finnish father and German mother, said he is particularly worried about what will happen if the public sector doesn’t adapt to the changing environment.

“Some of our public figures are using the new lexicon but they use it in such a way they demonstrate they don’t really understand what’s going on. We’ve made it our business to study these new models, we want to help people get their heads around them, because if they don’t citizens suffer, the public gets a bad deal from their public services,” he said.

Ms Beck added: “We’re such a small pond in Wales, these are public servants working to serve their own families. There’s such good talent in public service, it’s just not released and recognised as well as it could be. That’s where we look to try and help.”

The Williams Review contains 65 recommendations, Ms Carter points out, some linked to culture change and leadership, connecting the people who work in public organisations with their values.

And it’s not just public sector organisations that need to look at whether their culture helps or hinders their service delivery, Ms Beck argues.

“Citizens are becoming more knowledgeable and savvy and organisations have to respond to that. We’ve had a lot of interest from the private sector because they’re nimble and can change quite easily, so when we talk change to them they can apply it quite quickly in their organisations. The public sector is a big beast and to move it around is a slow burn,” she said.

“The private sector tends to be quicker to recognise when it’s losing customers and so is far quicker to adapt to change. The driver for change in the public sector comes from another direction. We’re advocating the idea that listening to your citizens is a much better way to find out how to design and deliver your public services of the future.”

The Satori Lab plans to create a panel of associates it can draw upon to deliver specific expertise.

Mr Reinikainen, who is a Finnish citizen although he has lived in the UK for more than two decades, argues that Wales has to avoid the trap of trying to borrow solutions to its problems from other countries.

“There are some brilliant advantages that Wales has and could have, but for some reason we’re not able to capitalise on the size of the nation and its potential to develop nimble relationships with other partners in Europe,” he said.

“You often hear these narratives like Estonia does technology really well, let’s go and do that. You can take elements of the success stories in Estonia or Finland but Wales has to craft its own solutions that work within this cultural context. The tools are available but the culture of the public sector organisations is the obstacle.”

Satori, in case you wondered, is a Japanese word – Ms Beck spent a year in Japan working as a teacher. It means, Mr Reinikainen explained, “the experience of seeing your true nature.”

Meeting through the Entrepreneurship school, the three co-founders found they had things in common.

“We thought, can we break through a lot of this artifice that’s going around and prevents people who are public value-minded from doing things in spite of these bureaucracies?

“What needs to happen is [to] take the time to reflect on who you really are, interrogate your personal values against the published values of your organisation, and see if they have anything to do with each other. If they don’t, there’s a further conversation to have.”

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